B (184)

47

B+W

Infantry at Ypres, Flanders, August 1917.

 Golden youth of Tipperary: photographer at Golden National School, Co Tipperary, November 1929.

‘Had Frank not felt a vocational call to be a member of the Society of Jesus (a Jesuit order),

he might well have taken up the then relatively new profession of photojournalism.’

I

n 1912, Frank received another gift

from his generous and apparently

rather well off uncle. Bishop Browne’s

Catholic cathedral at Cloyne overlooked

the harbour at Cobh (then known as

Queenstown), where Francis had already

taken photographs of the White Line’s Royal

Mail steamer Adriatic. The bishop’s gift this

time was a first class ticket for the first few

days of the maiden voyage of the ocean liner

whose tragic end has come to assume almost

mythical status – the Titanic. On 10 April

1912, Frank caught a train from London’s

Waterloo station to Southampton, armed

with a small Kodak folding camera.

The Titanic had two ports of call before

it set out across the Atlantic for New York –

Cherbourg and Cobh/Queenstown, which

was as far as Frank’s ticket took him. In that

five-day voyage, he took what was to become

the most complete on-board record of

that fateful ocean liner.

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